I asked, starting to feel uneasy.
“I figured once they voted me in what was the point?”
“How did they convince the indecisive one?”
“One of them said to him, ‘We have a real man here, and you’re going to let him get away?’” Father propped his elbow on the back of the pew, his hand so close to my face he could graze my cheek. Then he added, “The indecisive priest later told me that he pictured me in the suburbs with a wife, kids, and picket fence.” He said it as if he were fishing for me to say, “I do, too,” as if he were suggesting we get together. He was telling me what he’d been trying to all year. He was hungry, maybe even a little angry. A peaceful priest doesn’t take a woman out and talk about how good her sister smells, doesn’t repair a single woman’s home and then get nervous when he’s asked about it. The split vote made complete sense. It was the same ambivalence I pretended I didn’t feel. Father was going to help me answer God’s call. We were going to be each other’s best friend and celibate significant other. He was a fulfilled priest. I wouldn’t have to be alone anymore. I had no idea how much I was fooling myself. His hunger and anger mirrored mine. Despite the knot it my stomach, I said, “I’m glad you wound up here and not the suburbs.”
“How Houses Lean?” he asked, ripping off the last bit of wrapping paper.
“Learn, How Houses Learn,” I said earnestly. “You know, because you like houses? Because you would have gone into contracting?”
“Maria, this is beautiful, just beautiful,” he said lifting it over our coffee cups, trying his best to look at it and not me. “How Houses Learn,” he repeated slowly. Then he put it down and handed me a meticulously wrapped gift. “And this is for you.” I rubbed my hands together to express goodie. I tore the paper, stunned to see the name of my favorite store and then a pretty soft wool turtleneck in the perfect earthy color.
“Wow, how did you know my style? I like it so much.”
“I’ve been looking at you for a while now,” he said his face turning rose.
I looked into my cappuccino before I raised it to my lips.
“Last year you sent me a card. This year I get to sit with you.”
“I remember. It was a black and white of Shirley Temple putting an ornament on a tree.”
“That’s it,” he said, taking a gulp of tea.
“Did you like this year’s card?” I asked sheepishly. It was a picture of Raphael’s cherubs. Inside I wrote: Although I come across as very together and composed, I feel as if I’ll always be working through past hurts. Meeting you and initiating the friendship has given me the chance to trust a man again. The fact that you listen and are genuinely excited by the things/stories I share is such a gift (more than you can know). I treasure you in my life. May all the good you do for others be returned hundredfold to you (as I’m confident it will).
“Of course I did. What a blockhead I am. I loved it.”
We were in the diner for over an hour before I asked him what time it was. He was wearing a thick, expensive-looking watch, a Rolex, though I didn’t know it at the time. I asked him if it was new. “This? Just a gift from someone in the parish,” he said loosening his collar from his neck. It was an awfully showy gift for a priest to accept, one that could only be from a woman, but this was a man who knew which store to shop for me in, what fabric and color and even size I liked. No man had ever zeroed in on me so quickly. I was so swept away that I didn’t realize when he changed the subject. In fact, by the time he got my coat off the rack and held the door for me, I’d forgotten about the watch. Then standing beside our cars—mine a red, two-door with a spoiler on the back and his a Chevy sedan with the bumper sticker that read, Pregnant? Call 1-800- 325-LIFE—he said, “This has been my best Christmas ever,” and I said, “I’m so glad.” The next night, Christmas night, when he was leaving Janine’s where he’d been invited for dessert and I was sitting on her couch wearing the turtleneck he gave me, I looked in his eyes with such longing that I knew it would excite him. Several weeks later he told me that all he’d wanted to do was hug the life out of me.
Chapter Three
Telling Father
Within a month of meeting with Father Relici, I met with Sister Lorraine and two Sisters of Charity, Erin and Teresa. Sister Lorraine was a buxom woman in her fifties who wore a large silver cross around her neck and had warm eyes and short brown hair. After some small chat about work and family in her tiny diocesan office, she told me that before I pursued a religious vocation, I should go for spiritual direction, a process of learning to trust God and discern His will. She recommended Sister Erin who worked at a Jesuit retreat house not far from me and who, a couple of weeks later, greeted me with a hug and then offered me a seat in her office. As soon as I glanced out the window at the climbing ivy, I remembered I’d been there before in sophomore year of high school and again with my mother in my early twenties before I’d started pulling away from her. I remembered how much I loved retreats—the quiet time for reflection and journaling, Confession and Mass, the talks about God’s unconditional love—and how I always left feeling happy and fed.
After I answered Sister Erin’s questions about my job and told her about my meetings with Father Relici and Sister Lorraine, I said what I’d never said to anyone quite as clearly before: “I’m drawn to God but so afraid.” It was as if some closed latch in my throat finally opened. Except for telling her about Father Infanzi, I told her everything else about the previous four and a half years since I’d broken up with Dave and how ashamed I felt about not being able to pull myself together better. I was crying, and she was handing me tissues as she nodded her head with no judgment or even pity in her eyes. When she asked if I was going to therapy I said yes, though the truth was I’d stopped at the end of October. Maybe Father’s attention had given me the false sense that I was doing better. I was hoping that spiritual direction could take the place of therapy.
Sister said very gently that God never forces, He only invites, and that the aim of discernment is to figure out if I have a vocation and then which religious order would be the right match, but that the underlying purpose is always to draw closer to our loving God. She described discernment as a series of conversations with a particular order that would help us learn about each other, like dating. Then she told me about her order, the Sisters of Charity, that they were founded in 1809 by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born American citizen to become a saint and who was a wife and mother before she became a nun.
“Really?” I asked, but then I remembered the book my mother had on our shelf when I was growing up, Blessed Mother Seton. In the first part, there were pictures of Elizabeth with her husband and five children, and in the second part, a picture of her wearing a widow’s cap, which later became part of her habit. She closed the gap between marriage and celibacy a little for me and made being a nun seem less strange, at least for the moment. Before I left, Sister Erin and I scheduled another appointment for a month later. She also gave me the name and number of Sister Teresa, the Vocation Director, adding, “You’ll like Teresa. She’s Italian, from Brooklyn. Call her when you feel ready.” It was probably premature, but I trusted Sister Erin, who hugged me goodbye like she was trying to gather fallen leaves to her chest and was afraid one would slip. A week later I was driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike to the Convent of Our Lady in Fort Lee filled with dread. I hadn’t been in a convent since high school. I didn’t know anyone my age who was a nun: I hadn’t even heard of anyone becoming a nun anymore. As I zipped past Newark Airport, planes descended and ascended as my mind buzzed. Is there any turning back after tonight? How will I explain to everyone that I’m considering religious life when I don’t want to, that I really want to get married? A half mile later, as I passed a fuchsia billboard for a vacation resort with a couple lying in each other’s arms on the beach, my throat tightened.
While I waited for Sister Teresa to open the door, I looked at the one-family houses across the street and then back at the enormous stucco convent. All I could see of the Blessed Mother statue a few feet away from me were her palms facing upward in surrender. Within seconds, a tall,